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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

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Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#961

Post by emodendroket »

pjmlp wrote: post #924
emodendroket wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees. I mean, it seems within the realm of possibility that much more productive software engineers make more and not less money.

It is already the case that outside SV like scenarios, most devs are plain office workers like everyone else.

I don't see how this proves or disproves what I said. Can you elaborate?

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#962

Post by pjmlp »

emodendroket wrote: post #961
pjmlp wrote: post #924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already the case that outside SV like scenarios, most devs are plain office workers like everyone else.

I don't see how this proves or disproves what I said. Can you elaborate?

The salary levels are not the values many imagine, and definitely aren't going to go up.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#963

Post by yoyohello13 »

causal wrote: post #385
yoyohello13 wrote: post #370

I’m just continuing to get paid as long as I can, while also going back to school part time to train in a role that’s insulated from AI. Having a backup plan at least makes me feel better day to day.

> to train in a role that’s insulated from AI Would love to know more about that role

Paramedic

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#964

Post by gherlein »

My public blog response to this - and others saying the same thing - https://blog.herlein.com/post/domain-plus-software-superpowe... - Stop mourning the moat you thought you had. You have a much better one. You just need to pick up the new tool and start using it like it belongs in your hand.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#965

Post by bobro »

alkonaut wrote: post #886

I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so. As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a mod…

Imagine taking up a hobby of drawing, then bemoaning the existence of a printer. Or learning spanish, and bemoaning google translate. Or trying out woodworking, and bemoaning IKEA.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#966

Post by bobro »

odeono wrote: post #420
torben-friis wrote: post #56

My career path is suprisingly similar to the author's. Weirdly enough, what he takes as the first pillar to fall is the one I see most undamaged currently. LLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations. They're great at refactoring, translating between languages, tracing bugs on existing code even, but there is…

This. Once you're building something that genuinely hasn't been built before, LLMs cannot be trusted with any architectural decisions. I'm building a product based around various physics simulations, so it's purely first principles, but without active research, thinking, and challenging, it produces computational code literally hundreds of orders of magnitude slower WHILE implementing absurd fallbacks and shortcuts t…

>literally hundreds of orders of magnitude slower

I'm sure this is just a slip of the tongue (finger), but the idea of being a numerical googol times slower is funny.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#967

Post by tartoran »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #677

Woodworking sounds like a solid way to steer a career. Un-impacted by LLMs, or any trend/hyper or that matter. Great for keeping the body active after decades of sitting all day. Your produce (literally) tangible products. And above all: there's always a need for more skilled carpenters.

Most of us would not be able to become woodworkers or carpenters for a living. If white collar jobs get so affected by AI probably the competition in blue collar jobs would produce the worst race to the bottom.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#968

Post by tartoran »

entropyneur wrote: post #858

I don't care as much about LLMs deprecating my accumulated knowledge. After a quarter of a century in the industry I have plenty of stuff in my head of purely sentimental value. But for me, the real catastrophe is that they took away all my motivation to learn which was the main work driver for me. Anything I can learn now, the models probably already know or will learn soon enough. Steering LLMs isn't anywhere near…

Do stuff with your knowledge, apply it wherever you can. AI does not have have any agency to do ... anything.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#969

Post by DrewADesign »

bilater wrote: post #952
DrewADesign wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supercharge bit missed an important fact: that strategy is very temporary. Getting expertise in software development takes a long time. Getting expertise in these LLM tools takes a lot less time— the combination of LLM expertise and dev expertise is the useful part. If LLMs make working developers, say, 35% more efficient, that’s going to be many thousands of people out of work, many of them being the most experi…

you're being a doomer and only looking at how AI will take your job or suppress your wage. try to flip it around and see how you can do more. layoffs are coming and I have said as much in other posts but the top AI engineers will make a lot more money. ultimately they will get replaced to but in that scenario we should have reached AGI abundance.

I’m in a trade now. I’ll be fine. I’ve got a pension.

And those AI engineers won’t be making bank for very long.

Looking at basic economics— labor supply and demand within this field— is not being a ‘doomer’, it’s just not letting boundless optimism trump rational analysis. It’s not like this is the first profession to get sucked into the air intake of the machine that replaced them.

Switching from software dev to AI engineer is an achievable lateral move, and we will have a lot of surplus software devs. Few of them will have skills that will transfer cleanly enough to keep the mortgage paid. Guess what job they’ll try to move into? Unless this turns out fundamentally different from what the big companies are implying, we’re not going to see demand that isn’t wholly satisfied by the current workforce for decades. With that much expertise desperate for a job, there’s no reasonable path to keeping wages high.

Sure there might be a few tech PhDs + MBAs at the director level that are making bank, but we’re building a system that replaces us, and the industry is not going to magically stop at this arbitrary level of replacement.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#970

Post by jval43 »

oldnewthing wrote: post #622

Hey, I agree with you. I and my team have the same existential worries. This was one reason why I bought my own subscriptions to Claude and Codex to learn and skill up. I have been using that to intensively do side projects, curating prompts and workflows to see how these new tools fit in my toolbox. I have been bringing back the learnings to my team so that they can upskill as well. For context, I use Claude and Cod…

Problem-solving is not the same as engineering or computer science though.

Problem-solving can be done by an "analyst" or whatever these types of jobs are usually called.

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